Forum:Using CSS to remove the save button in the WYSIWYG editor
I don't use the WYSIWYG editor since it tends to get in the way far more than it is helpful, so it took a while for me to see this. The editor apparently has a save button in the top menu bar, separate from the regular save button, that allows users to save edits while remaining in the edit window. This is very bad, and I say this as a MediaWiki developer and server administrator. In the immediate concern, it encourages users to spam edits and create many minor revisions of each page. This clutters up the logs, and makes page histories very hard to navigate. This is very bad for anyone trying to do in depth work on the wiki, who might need to access page histories. Furthermore, the fact that it clutters the page history means that it's harder to find incriminating revisions by people who edit abusively or with a particular POV. There's also a very bad long-term server stability reason for preventing people from spamming edits; it will eventually make the wiki massively slow. Every time a page is saved, the entire content of the page are saved along with that revision in the database; if you change two letters in a 100,000 word page, the entire 100,000 words are saved in a single revision in the database. This means that a 100,000 character page that is edited 10 times will take up a megabyte in the database. When the database becomes very large, it causes the wiki to slow down, eventually to the point that the wiki becomes unusable. If we remove the button, it will go a long way to preventing the problem. And I have noticed a serious problem with people spamming edits. I also propose that we have a policy to prevent edit spamming. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 16:28, May 12, 2013 (UTC) :I can't really make a point yet because I'm not exactly sure what this function is. Is this "save" feature actually named save or is that just what it does. From what I understand, you are describing the tool that if you say accidentally close the window, the editor will recover where you left off, no? I think this is just an automatic feature, there is no button for it. If this is the save feature you are talking about than I agree with disabling it because compared to how many times it actually prevented work from being lost, it is fundamentally useless. -- 18:46,5/12/2013 18:46, May 12, 2013 (UTC) ::I actually just opened the WYSIWYG editor in the Wikia skin so I could grab the CSS class for it, but I didn't see it. The save button is not an automatic feature. It's also not the regular save button that takes you back to the page after you click it. The one I'm talking about is one that allows you to save revisions of the article while still in the edit window. It's not doing a temporary save in the event that you lose the window while editing; it does a complete revision, which takes up space in the history and database. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 20:23, May 12, 2013 (UTC) :::Nonetheless, I do agree with you that it should be removed because it does not seem like it would have any real use and if it really does create a log nightmare than it is just better to deal with it now. -- 21:19,5/12/2013 21:19, May 12, 2013 (UTC) ::::That's good. I didn't see it, but if you do, please let me know because it's really bad. It seems like it would be a good idea at first, but it's really monumentally stupid. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 01:38, May 13, 2013 (UTC)